My name's Anthony Padilla.
And today I'm going to be sitting down with people with aphantasia to learn what
it's really like to experience what some have referred to as blind imagination,
due to the inability to visualize mental imagery in their mind's eye.
Do these aphantasics as they're sometimes referred to as,
exists blissfully unaffected by what they can't experience, or does the mere reality
that most people perceive a different degree of sensation leave them with
an overwhelming feeling of emptiness?
[music]
What does having aphantasia entail?
-If I say to you, Anthony, think of a horse.
Does some visual image of a horse come to your mind?
-I see a brown coat.
I see a certain size of a horse.
I see a certain type of tail.
-I can't do that.
I don't see that image in my mind.
I don't have that visual picture-it system.
That really defines aphantasia.
[music]
-What's your first memory of realizing that the way that you perceive the world
is different than the way others do?
-I was reading Harry Potter and there are these gorgeously written
descriptions of the castle and I couldn't see what was being written about.
-Things like counting sheep not making sense to me.
-Did that ever work for anyone by the way?
How does that-- I don't know.
-Even as a kid, I was just like, okay what do these sheep look like?
Let's break it down.
-Was it that moment that you realized that you were different
or did you just think that everyone perceived the world like you?
-I thought completely visualizing things was metaphorical up until I had this
hypnotherapy session, they asked me to visualize stuff and I just wasn't
coping with it in any way whatsoever.
I was just panicking because I was thinking,
"Am I supposed to be seeing this?"
What?
This sounds like something you'd experience on psychedelics.
-I'd just come home from a party, I had a partner and we had seen a mutual friend.
She's like "Joanne was wearing the same thing she was wearing last year."
I was just really taken back.
I was like, "How do you remember what she wore last year?"
She's like, "I see the picture in my mind."
I was like, "What do you mean you see a picture in your mind?"
Then from that moment, I was obsessed.
I asked everybody I could think of like, "Do you see pictures?
What's that experience like?"
-Did you almost assume that people were exaggerating or
using a word wrong or something?
-I thought it was more metaphorical than literal.
This was maybe in like 2010 aphantasia hadn't been discovered.
Aphantasia was only discovered in 2015 and put a name to it.
-Holy shit, six years ago, this did not exist?
-Brand new.
The estimate is roughly 3% of the population, my guess is
the majority of people who have aphantasia don't even know it.
-Do you remember the moment that you first found out there was a name for this?
-I read an article last year at Pixar and found out that about 50% of their staff
had aphantasia and the other 50% didn't.
That was very striking because those are maybe the people who have
to be the most visual of anyone.
-A couple of years later I found a paper from a professor in the UK
who studied a man, he lost the ability to visualize after a stroke.
I reached out to that professor and was like,
"Hey, I've never been able to visualize."
Because something changed for somebody, that's how they identified it.
Then they wrote a paper a couple of years later saying,
"Hey, this thing is called congenital aphantasia.
There's a huge portion of people who are born like this,
who never have been able to visualize."
-I've read that many people can't visualize memories
or images of the future.
-My relationship with my memories are very different.
I don't relive those experiences.
I have the facts of what happened, I know what happened.
Maybe that can make me feel a certain way in the present but it's different
than feeling what I felt back then.
-You don't relive those experiences, which I'm guessing could be
great for horrible/traumatic experiences in your past.
Leave them in the past, but then again I'm sure there are certain moments
that you would like to relive, whether it be a lost friend or family member
or a great experience in your life.
-I would love to be able to re-experience great childhood friends and great
memories but I can't do that.
I know that they've happened but I can't put myself there.
-I feel like many people are really attached to this idea of preparing for
their future because they imagine it to be one way, do you find that you're able
to live life more freely in that sense?
-I think that I live my life more with a compass rather than a map.
I don't have this image of where I'm going, I just know
the direction that I'm going.
I know what I care about and what I'd like to see but it's hard to
have an end destination, a clear idea of what it is if you can't see it.
-One of the reasons I'm so nostalgic for my childhood is I feel like I was
just experiencing things in the present, not getting so caught up
in all my worries and fears about the future.
I feel like as I've gotten older, I've lost that ability.
Now, I'm really stuck in preparing and making sure that these expectations that
I have do not collapse on themselves.
Do you find that same nostalgia for your childhood where things were
more about living in the present?
-I don't live in the past.
It's hard for me to live in the past.
I have to actually tell my stories.
I have to actually verbalize it.
-Does this affect any of your other senses?
-There are some aphantasics who don't see images but still hear sound
and still can feel touch and then there are some aphantasics like me
who don't have any of the senses.
-You literally can't feel touch.
-I can't imagine touch.
It's called tactile imagery.
If you were to rub your hand over a brick wall, can you imagine what it feels like?
-Absolutely.
I feel like I have a deeper relationship with imagining textures and feelings
than I do even visual imagery.
-Every person has their own unique imagery profile.
You might be more tactile dominant and someone else might be more
olfactory or smell-based and they can really imagine smell.
-I've found that I'm more attached to textures and even colors.
People often ask me, "What's your favorite color?"
I'm like, "I don't know.
I don't give a shit."
Then if someone were to ask me my favorite texture,
I would probably have a huge list.
Everything that's set up in my shot right now I purposely picked because
of the texture, because of the way that when I see it on screen
I can imagine the way that it feels.
The brick in the back, the wood, the fur, all of it, I imagine it when
I see it and it's satisfying to me.
-I don't know what that experience is like.
-Would you like to know what it's like to not have aphantasia?
-If I was given the choice of being able to test it out, I definitely would.
There's part of me that's super, super, super curious but also I've
worked fine the way I am so far.
-If I could take something temporary and try it for a day I would.
If it were permanent I would definitely not.
-It would be cool if I could just strap on a VR headset and whatever was going on in
my brain could be translated into imagery.
-Even so, I think that would be more visual than what
imagining these images is.
It doesn't feel like you're actually looking at it.
You know it's a memory, you know it's an idea but it's still like
you're able to interpret it.
-I'm imagining that it would be very one-to-one.
-If that were the case then I would just shut my eyes and lay in my bed
all day and why buy that VR headset.
It's a very different experience because it feels like it's all blurry,
there's gaps, you're really limited by how much you focus on each aspect of it.
It's not really a passive experience.
-I'd certainly like to know what that's like.
- [chuckles] Is there a test or anything that someone can do who may be,
for example, is watching and wondering if they have aphantasia or not?
-I found a better test than the apple because I think a lot of people have
preconceived notions of how apples look and the texture and stuff.
-Then it is the general test.
What does an apple look like?
Close your eyes, imagine it.
-Imagine or visualize in your mind's eye three spheres.
Can you tell me the color of them and how they're laid out?
-They're just three spheres floating in an empty white room, one is light almost white,
the other is a middle gradient and the other one is a dark gradient.
They look like they're sketched in, almost like they're
hand-sketched in with graphite.
-For me, that question makes no sense because I can conceptualize three spheres.
It's like there could be three spheres.
They could be in a triangular layout, one could be far in
distance, one could be really close.
I don't have a tangible image there.
You straight away, you said, "Oh, that one's like sketched in, this
one it was on a white background."
You clearly had something there to work with because otherwise,
you wouldn't have said specifically those details.
If you ask me that I'd just be like, "Well, what color do you want them to be?"
-You start wanting to get more details because you're like,
"Hey, you set up the scene, you better finish the scene."
While other people can get a scene started and then they could just
make up the rest, fill in the blank.
Do you find that you're frequently met with resistance when people
find out that you have aphantasia?
-Definitely, in the early days, before there was a name for it,
you can't visualize what it's like to not visualize.
Once there became a name for it then it became a lot easier to point to and
say, "Hey, look, this is a real thing."
-There's science.
I'm not making it up.
-I also see the other side with people with aphantasia when they
learn that other people are actually visualizing, they're in disbelief.
-There's just that disconnect from being able to experience something versus not.
It's like if I told you, "Hey, there's this extra color that's
always been there that a very small percentage of the world can see."
-It's impossible to verify because you can't experience it yourself.
You have to trust people that they're telling you the truth.
-Do you think having aphantasia has ever been an advantage for you?
-For me, it's like I love re-watching movies and TV shows or even replaying
video games because once I've been interested in something I love going
back and picking out lots of different details because it's almost like I'm
playing it again for the first time.
-I'm more of a conceptual thinker.
When I asked you to think of a horse, I didn't see an instance of a horse.
There is no brown horse in my mind.
It's still just the idea of a horse.
I think that translates to say you had a bad chicken, the next day someone
says, "Do you want to have chicken?"
Most people are going to be re-experiencing that bad
dish that they just had.
-It happens all the time.
-It's like, "Oh, I don't want it."
[crosstalk]
-I'm like, "Oh, I vomited kool-aid up on my couch when I was growing up.
Definitely not going to drink the red kool-aid anymore."
-For me, it's like I know that that happened, but because I
can't re-experience it, I'm more likely to give it another try.
-I did an experiment with this painter friend where we just picked
a random passage from Lord of the Rings, gave each other 20 minutes
to make these little sketches.
I have to construct this scene completely from scratch and because of that
I actually have maybe even more freedom than somebody without aphantasia because
they just see a whole image and they're like, "Okay, let me just make that image."
-Which I think is fascinating.
You did this test and this is what you came up with.
-Which of the two drawings do you think I did?
-This first one has a very blank background.
It seems to be very focused on the characters in the scene, not too much
about the environments and then this other one here, I'm seeing more emotion.
This one also has a lot of emphasis on the background, but yet at the same time,
I could see there was a tiny sketch up at the top corner that this artist did to
get an idea of how they would frame it.
Initially, I was thinking that the second one with the background was
your friend who doesn't have aphantasia because I'm feeling more emotion.
I feel like if an artist is drawing something based off memory,
there's probably more emotion there, but now I'm second-guessing because I
see that there was some prep done beforehand almost to perfect this scene.
Now I feel like this second image, which I actually feel more emotional from is you.
-You're right.
That analysis was really spot-on and the thumbnail I think it's a pretty
dead giveaway that I was pre-planning.
-It was a lot more intentional.
-Your observation about the intense focus on the body language in my friends drawing
makes a lot of sense in that context because for them,
they just all saw the whole scene because we gave ourselves an arbitrary time limit of 20 minutes,
they've just nailed that and then didn't get to the whole thing but
whereas I didn't have any preconceived notions, and so my goal was 20 minutes
was let me construct the most complete picture of this thing possible.
-Do you think people with aphantasia tend to have more or less creative careers?
-Early data shows that they gravitate more towards STEM fields,
but that doesn't mean that you can't be a creative.
Some very notable aphanthasics, Ed Catmull, the co-founder of
Pixar, Glen Keane, he was the animator of The Little Mermaid.
It just goes to show you that people can do things even if they go at it
in a way that other people don't.
-Before we continue learning about the world of aphantasia,
have you been able to find any biological or evolutionary reason why some people
might be able to visualize things?
I wanted to mention that the more I learn about people or different communities,
the more I'm reminded that everyone's reality is different to some degree,
regardless of if it's aphantasia or sensory-related or classified or personal
experiences and curiosity and empathy goes so much further than judgment.
Anyway, I think it's really cool that this series has helped me be more
aware of that and I appreciate all of you, whether you're subscribed
or just a casual viewer, for helping this series continue to thrive.
Now, back to the world of aphantasia.
[music]
You founded the aphantasia network.
-The idea was let's build a place where we can pull aphantasics together,
where we can write about our experience and share our ideas, these invisible differences.
What makes some of these differences, we try and uncover, maybe what are some
of the strengths or alternate strategies that we can use so that you can turn it
maybe into something more of a story.
-Have you been able to find any biological or evolutionary reason
why some people might be able to visualize things and some wouldn't?
-Cortical excitability, which is basically the sensitivity of
neurons in your frontal cortex.
The more sensitive, the more they fire, the less vivid the imagery.
Think of it like popcorn popping in a pan, and the more they're
popping, the more it's making the thing behind it a little fuzzy.
We're also doing some work around genetic markers to try and see if there's
something deeper that we can find because it does look like there is at least
the potential for a hereditary link.
-You actually animated a video about your experience with aphantasia,
which is currently the most viewed video on the entire internet about aphantasia.
-Many of them stating that the image in their head was so clear, it could be real.
-What was your experience like putting that together?
-As soon as I discovered it, I was like, "Oh my God, I have
to tell people about this."
Especially being an artist, because it highlighted a lot of the struggles I had
had previously with sketching out ideas.
For the longest time, I thought I was bad at drawing because I have to sketch stuff out
loads and loads and loads of times.
-Did you expect so many people to be fascinated about aphantasia
and obviously, therefore your video receiving so many views?
-I honestly don't know what I expected when I put that video out.
I'm amazed that it has opened up so many doors and so many
people want to talk about it.
When I did upload it, I was thinking, "Oh, is this a bit of a niche thing,
I can't see many people talking about it."
There is part of me that was like, "This could take off."
I didn't make it with that intention to go viral or whatever.
-Would you feel comfortable walking us through some of the pieces
that you have here in your studio?
-Sure, yes, hang on.
Here it is so far.
So far, it's just the ocean.
-There's so many different steps and details that you've
gone through to get to this.
-Because there's no pre-visualization for me, the work can really
take big jumps and leaps.
The Salem Witch Trials.
I looked through a lot of YouTube videos actually of
walkthroughs of haunted mansions.
I worked from those images and then populated that with just other people.
-Very straight lines and the composition is very calculated.
-Yes.
Versus this which is more invented.
-Alien B-hole wants to know if you dream and how that experience is.
-I do, very vividly.
-The fact that you can visualize dreams so vividly means that it's not like
some part of your brain just doesn't work, it's just that it doesn't
fire off in the same way at the same time.
-It's a different part of your brain that works when you're dreaming
as opposed to if you were conscious and trying to visualize because I was
like, "Oh, I can dream so maybe there's just like a shut-off switch here."
I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.
I'd like to hope that it's not because that might give me an opportunity
to unravel the mystery of why I can dream but can't visualize.
-If there's anyone watching, who, throughout the course of watching
this video, realized, "Oh, I probably have aphantasia," is there anything
that you want to say to them?
-Try and find the strength in your unique way of thinking.
There are pros and cons to it.
It's not that seeing images is good and not seeing images is bad,
it's a different way of thinking.
-What do you think is the biggest misconception about aphantasia?
-That you don't have an imagination.
It's not the lack of imagination, I can imagine all sorts of wacky stuff
but I'll have to work out how to translate.
It's the lack of consciously being able to visualize something in your head.
You can be imaginative completely and creative with aphantasia,
you find a different way to do it.
-All right, you got five seconds a shout out or promote anything
you want directly into camera, go.
-We all imagine differently and if you want to see where you
fall on the imagination spectrum, go to imaginationspectrum.com.
-Katherinedu.com for more of my work and if you have resources,
please consider donating to Cafe Maddy Cab.
-I'm AmyRightMeow across all socials and I hope you're having a nice day.
-Hey everyone, don't subscribe to Kurtis Connor, subscribe
to Anthony Padilla instead.
- [laughs] She's kidding, we love Kurtis.
We love you Kurtis, my boy.
After spending the day with these aphantatists, I've come to understand
just how much living with or without aphantasia certainly shapes
the way one perceives the world.
It's important to remember that reality truly does differ from
one person to another, if for no reason, other than simply the way
our brains formed in the womb.
[music]
-Squeeze that like button, like a lemon, a small lemon.
- [laughs] One that you can totally visualize or not,
it doesn't matter no judgment.
[laughs] I straight up imagined a tiny lemon in your hand.
-A tiny lemon, now I'm thinking about tiny lemonade.
- [laughs]